Main points
- Understanding brain/behavior relations requires a diverse toolkit
- Structural vs. functional methods
- Spatial and temporal resolution
- Invasive vs. non-
Here’s a pretty one of the hippocampus.
And here is one from Santiago Ramon y Cajal.
Here’s a Nissl-stained section of the macaque brain. It stains only cell bodies, but the density of staining tells us where there are lots of cells and where there are fewer.
Here’s a CT image of two brains, the one on the right has an intracerebral hemorrhage.
Here is an illustration of the different slices of an image sequence.
Here’s an example of MR spectroscopy showing the concentrations of several different metabolites in a large voxel of brain tissue.
Volume differences in schizophrenic patients vs. controls
And here’s an illustration of the use of morphometric techniques. The colored portions are statistical maps placed on top of a base structural map. The statistical maps provide information about the comparison in brain volumes between patients and controls in those areas.
The idea is analogous to electronics. We want the schematic. Without the schematic, we can’t really tell what the thing does.
Here’s an illustration of what a tensor looks like. You can see an isotropic and an anisotropic tensor.
Lichtman, J. W., Livet, J., & Sanes, J. R. (2008). A technicolour approach to the connectome. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 9(6), 417–422. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2391
Pomarol-Clotet, E., Canales-Rodrı́guez, E. J., Salvador, R., Sarró, S., Gomar, J. J., Vila, F., … McKenna, P. J. (2010). Medial prefrontal cortex pathology in schizophrenia as revealed by convergent findings from multimodal imaging. Mol. Psychiatry, 15(8), 823–830. https://doi.org/10.1038/mp.2009.146
Sejnowski, T. J., Churchland, P. S., & Movshon, J. A. (2014). Putting big data to good use in neuroscience. Nature Neuroscience, 17(11), 1440–1441. https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.3839